Platonic Academy of Florence"

Humanist Academies and the "Platonic Academy of Florence" The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Hankins, James. Forthcoming. Humanist academies and the “Platonic Academy of Florence.” In Proceedings of the conference, "From the Roman Academy to the Danish Academy in Rome," ed. H. Ragn Jensen and M. Pade. Analecta Romana Instituti Danici Supplementum. Copenhagen: Odense University Press. Published Version http://www.acdan.it/analecta/english.htm Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:2936369 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA 1 Forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference, From the Roman Academy to the Danish Academy in Rome, ed. H. Ragn Jensen and M. Pade, to appear in Analecta Romana Instituti Danici Supplementum. Humanist Academies and the “Platonic Academy of Florence” James Hankins (Harvard University) It is now widely recognized that the student of early humanist academies has to use great care when dealing with the numerous but often ambiguous references to academies and academic life in fifteenth century sources. The second half of the Quattrocento was the formative period for the idea of learned, literary and artistic academies, and it is all too easy to impose on fifteenth-century sources anachronistic assumptions drawn from the sixteenth and later centuries about the purpose, organization, and general character of these early associations of humanists. This is especially a problem when using the older literature on academies, for example Maylender’s Storia delle accademie d’Italia and Della Torre’s Storia dell’Accademia Platonica di Firenze, which are sometimes misled by the playful and metaphorical ways of talking indulged in by humanists.1 It is fatally easy to reify into an institution what may only be a humanist’s rhetorical compliment to some prince for his devotion to literature, and it often happens that modern scholars mistakenly interpret references to universities (often called academiae or gymnasia by humanists) as references to humanist academies. There is also the ever-present danger of 1 Maylender 1926-1930; Della Torre 1902. 1 2 campanilismo, which is partly responsible, it seems, for the excessive importance attributed to Ficino’s academy in Florence, and the relative neglect of more influential models in Rome and Naples.2 The terminology regarding academies, sodalitates, studia, gymnasia, coetus litteratorum, etc. is imprecise and unstable in this period and one has to pick one’s way with great care among documents and literary sources that were not always clearly understood by contemporaries, let alone by us. It is also now well known that the word academia was used for a variety of places, things, concepts and associations in the fifteenth century. As the present writer has documented elsewhere, it was used for humanist schools, such as those of Guarino Veronese and Gasparino Barzizza, as a word roughly equivalent to gymnasium. It was also widely used by humanists as a classicizing equivalent to studium or university, and in this sense was used to denote the universities of Bologna, Florence, Padua, Rome and others. It was also used, in a way clearly modelled on Cicero, to describe rooms in houses devoted to study and discussion, often containing books and portrait busts of ancient writers. Ficino used the word idiosyncratically as roughly equivalent to libri platonici, a highly metaphorical use that has led to much confusion in the secondary literature. It was also used to refer to the philosophical tradition of the ancient Academy in Athens, both in its skeptical and in its dogmatically Platonic phases. Finally, the word is used to describe associations of literary men, sodalitia, usually gathered around some charismatic or powerful individual who inspires or sponsors the literary activities of the group. It is often hard to say just how coherent and permanent such groups are, and it is sometimes the case that we are dealing with little more than an off-hand compliment, as when a 2 Chambers 1995, 3-5. 2 3 monastery frequented by Lorenzo de’Medici and Pico is referred to as ‘a academy of the Christian faith’.3 One has to add immediately that it is not always possible to draw neat lines between these categories. Humanist schools such as Guarino’s were sometimes associated with universities, and it is often unclear whether an author using the word academia is talking about Guarino’s own classes and students or those of the Ferrarese studium of which he was a part. Barzizza’s gymnasium, which he also called an academy, was an exclusive boarding house for noble students at the University of Padua, similar to some hospices at Bologna or the halls of medieval Oxford.4 On the other hand, one finds literary sodalities that undertake educational activities. For example Pomponio Leto’s sodalitium organized poetry recitals and oratorical displays in which younger members would perform a program for an audience of older members.5 I suspect that we are dealing with just such a hybrid usage in the well-known case of the Chorus Academiae Florentinae, ‘the band of the Florentine academy’, which refers to a group of Argyropoulos’ students who were studying at the Florentine Studio (or Academy) but had a separate identity of their own as students interested in studying philosophy and literature with Argyropoulos. Giuseppe Zippel, Arthur Field and D. S. Chambers regard this group as the ancestor of Ficino’s later academy and I think this is correct.6 In general it is rare for a fifteenth century academy to operate too far from the orbit of the local university. Sometimes academies were residential houses for university students; 3 Hankins 1990a; Hankins 1991, reprinted in Hankins 2003-2004, 187-272; see also Hankins 2002 and Hankins 2007a. For academia as a name for the University of Rome, see the article of Concetta Bianca in this volume. 4 Mercer 1979. 5 See below. A parallel Florentine case is offered by the students of Bartolomeo Scala or of Giorgio Antonio Vespucci who presented ancient plays in Latin or Greek. 6 Zippel 1902, 445-46; Field 1988, 107-8; Chambers 1995, 4-5 3 4 sometimes their membership merely overlapped with that of poetry and rhetoric masters and students at the university; sometimes the relations were more distant. This fact too is relevant to understanding what Ficino’s academy was like. But I want to postpone to the end of this essay a consideration of just what Ficino’s academy was, because I think that that discussion will gain from a comparison with the activities of other humanist academies in the fifteenth century. I shall not discuss academies in the sense of studia, gymnasia, libri platonici, philosophical traditions or rooms in palaces and villas. I shall concentrate instead on the academy as sodalitas or sodalitium literatorum – terms, by the way, far more widely used than academia for the phenomenon we are describing. These sodalitates are defined by D. S. Chambers in an important article of 1995 as ‘coteries dominated by one or two charismatic individuals, mainly interested in the literature and ideas of the ancient world’.7 Chambers dates the fashion for using the word academia to describe such groupings to the Council of Florence in 1439, though clearly informal groups of humanists had met for discussion long before that. An example would be the gathering of Salutati’s disciples depicted in Leonardo Bruni’s Dialogi ad Petrum Histrum of 1402/5.8 Chambers gives 1540 as the approximate date for the emergence of the first academy recognizably of the early modern type, i.e., the Infiammati of Padua. It is the quattrocento sodalitates literatorum which Chambers sees, correctly I believe, as the true ancestors of the institutions that call 7 Chambers 1995, 2. 8 Bruni 1994. Poggio refers to the disciples of Coluccio Salutati as an ‘academy’ in his funeral oration for Leonardo Bruni (d. 1444), in Bruni 2007, I, cxvii; Bruni, he says, before his death had been the only one left of that group: ‘Restabat hic unus veterum studiorum et quasi renascentis olim academiae socius.’ 4 5 themselves academies in early modern Europe – not the largely mythical ‘Platonic Academy of Florence.’9 The sodalitates literatorum found in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century can be subdivided into various types. There are, first of all, what might be called the house academies – academies that met in the house of a scholar, usually to use his library and to consult with other scholars frequenting the place on matters of mutual interest. Bessarion’s academy was of this sort, as was that of Alessandro and Paolo Cortesi, and also Aldus’s Neakademia in Venice should probably be put in this category.10 The room or rooms in which they met were sometimes, confusingly, referred to as the Academy (or, echoing Cicero, as the Academy and Lyceum). There were, secondly, court academies, elite social gatherings where individuals engaged in more-or-less organized displays of erudition and learned play. This was the sort of gathering depicted by Castiglione in The Courtier, but analogous groups are found at the Neapolitan court of Alfonso d’Aragona, and the so-called Academia de San Pietro of Isabella d’Este. These ‘academies’ seem to have been rather impermanent, sometimes confined to a single short period; sometimes, indeed, we may suspect that they were little more than fantasies concocted by courtly sycophants or uncritical scholarship. They are closely related to the Venetian compagnie di calzo of the early sixteenth century, which in due course developed institutional notes such as statutes, officers, and regular banquets.

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